KENS

From Sega Retro

KENS (Short for KosinskiEnigmaNemesisSaxman compression formats) is a set of dynamic link libraries by Magus that compress and decompress the aforementioned four compression formats. The files are intended for use by programmers inside compiled programs. Magus himself made a compressor using the DLLs: The Sega Data Compressor.

It was first developed under LGPL v.2 so that programs similar to TSDC could be used on UNIX, Windows, and Mac and so that TSDC (the program he was at the time writing) could be developed faster. If a fix in the algorithms was all that was needed, then only the DLL files needed to be updated, and not the interface.

Later (when kens v1.4 RC1 was released in 2007) kram1024 officially provided a autotools based KENS with code cleanups and command line tools to go with it. At that point, Magus retired from KENS development and placed kram1024 in charge.

kram1024 mostly kept the autotools version up to date and is working on PipeComp() and PipeDecomp() functions for 1.4 final and will merge the UNIX and Windows ports together so that the same source will build with MinGW, CygWin, Dev C++, Code::Blocks, Visual C++ 6.0, Visual C++ .Net, Visual C++ 2005 (including express edition), Visual C++ 2008 (including express edition), and Visual C++ 2010 (including express edition).

The new KENS will go in a new direction. It will no longer need buffers or external files, but will also be able to work directly with streams, though legacy support will be wrapped into Comp() and Decomp() so that older KENS programs will still work. to use the new API, one simply uses one of the overloaded functions (overloaded to use streams versus char * arrays).

The end result would be code that could be used to make 68k static libraries.